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Here Come the First D10 Speakers: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Entrepreneur Sean Parker, Zynga’s Mark Pincus and More on the Red Hot Seat

Kara Swisher — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:40:29 +0000

Even though our D: All Things Digital conference always sells out well in advance every year without our announcing even one single speaker (like this one, too), it’s the action on stage that truly matters.

And in 2012 — which also happens to be the 10th anniversary of the confab of tech and media titans — it’s already shaping up to be another fantastic event in terms of programming, with a lineup of onstage appearances that is sure to make some news.

There are many more very big names to come, but Walt Mossberg and I are pleased to introduce the first group of interviewees, which will give you a glimpse into the firepower we expect at D10 in late May. It is again being held in Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles.

The initial speakers we have confirmed so far include: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur Sean Parker, who will appear with Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek; Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz; LinkedIn Chairman and VC Reid Hoffman, who will appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; and Skype CEO Tony Bates.

It’s hard to imagine someone we have wanted to have onstage more than Michael Bloomberg, a man of many talents and interests. He’s known worldwide as the 108th Mayor of the City of New York. First elected in November 2001 (and again in 2005 and 2009), he is also one of the most compelling politicians in the U.S. today.

But Bloomberg is also a pioneer in terms of the business of digital news and information technology, having built a huge and groundbreaking media company and information service. Bloomberg (the company) has 310,000 subscribers to its financial news and information service, and more than 15,000 employees worldwide.

There will be a lot to talk about with him, from the upcoming presidential election to the state of our government to the future of innovation, news and technology.

Also sure to be voluble is Sean Parker, the legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of innumerable important digital trends of the recent decade. In 1999, Parker co-founded Napster, the controversial and industry-changing music service, at the age of 19.

He followed up with early contact information service Plaxo, and then shifted over to his critical involvement as founding president of Facebook in its early days as a start-up, an experience which was dramatized in the movie “The Social Network.” Parker continued to found and also invest in companies, from Causes to Spotify to his most recent, Airtime, a social video company that he is doing with his Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning.

Parker will be appearing onstage with Daniel Ek, another serial entrepreneur and technologist, who started his first company in 1997 at the age of 14. The Swedish native later co-founded online music phenom Spotify in 2006, with Martin Lorentzon.

The former CTO of Stardoll and founder of Advertigo leads a company that is changing the way music is delivered and consumed by fans, against a backdrop of intense change in the industry, succeeding even as a plethora of other services have stumbled.

Also a groundbreaker is Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus, yet another serial entrepreneur, whose latest effort in the online gaming arena has finally resulted in his biggest success. It recently went public, and now has a nearly $10 billion market cap.

Before founding Zynga in 2007, Pincus had already started three other companies: Push start-up Freeloader in 1995; automated tech-support company Support.com after that; and early social networking site Tribe.net in 2003.

(I met Pincus when he was at Freeloader in Washington, D.C., while writing a profile of him for the Washington Post, so I have enjoyed tracking his progress since then.)

Pincus is also an avid angel investor, with early stakes in Napster, Brightmail, Twitter and Facebook.

Reid Hoffman was another early investor in Facebook, along with many of Web 2.0’s most successful ventures. Well-known in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and VC, and recently dubbed the “start-up whisperer” by the New York Times (although I am not sure exactly what that means), he’s also chairman of LinkedIn, the business-networking service that also recently went public (at a $10 billion valuation, too).

He’ll appear with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who started out life in Hollywood, but soon made his way to Silicon Valley as a top exec at Yahoo. After running its media division, Weiner spent a short time at venture firms before going operational again at LinkedIn.

What it takes to build and maintain momentum as tech companies move into more mature stages, as well as how the social networking space evolves, are among the many topics on tap for the pair.

The evolution of a start-up phenom — in this case, Internet telephony service Skype — will be among the topics covered by Tony Bates, who is now a president at Microsoft, which bought it last year.

As such, he is responsible, says the software giant in its description of his job, “for overseeing the company’s direction, strategy and overall mission to become a global communications service that will eventually reach billions of users.”

That’s a tall order for Bates, who came to Skype from a top job at Cisco. Bates has deep roots (or maybe, routing?) in the guts of the Internet, having done backbone-engineering strategy for Internet MCI. The U.K. native also holds nine patents.

Lastly, given all the activity we expect will happen between government regulatory agencies and tech companies over the next few years, we felt it was key to bring in FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. He has been at the FTC as a commissioner since 2004, but was given the top job by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Among his priorities, according to his bio, is “promoting competition and innovation in the technology sector through law enforcement and policy initiatives; and protecting consumers’ privacy — especially while they are using the Internet.”

Uh-oh!

Leibowitz knows from regulation, having served as the Democratic chief counsel and staff director for the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on competition policy and telecommunications matters, as well as a similar stint at the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology before that.

There will be a lot more speakers to come, of course. But, so far, we think D10 is off and running fast.

Viral Video: Julian Assange Is a Samantha (But a Charlotte to the Swedish Police)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:15:28 +0000

BoomTown was deep in meetings at the Dow Jones mother ship in New York yesterday with more suits than you can find at Barneys, so I failed to get up this latest Julian Assange spoof from “Saturday Night Live.”

Here the WikiLeaks leader comments on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently beating him out for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The faux Assange is not happy that social networking beat out classified documents.

This skit–the third so far–seems to be getting funnier each time:

D: Dive Into Mobile: The Full Interview Video of Spotify's Daniel Ek

Kara Swisher — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 17:05:59 +0000

As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did last week at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all this week and next.

And today, here’s Spotify’s Daniel Ek (pictured here) singing for his supper.

Well, not in the U.S. as yet, where the Swedish CEO and co-founder of the innovative streaming music service has not been able to make good on his promise to strike deals with music labels, which fear the popularity of Spotify could cut back on sales of CDs and digital downloads.

In Europe, the popular service offers unlimited tracks for free, or users can subscribe for an advertising-free version.

Ek talks about all this and more in his interview with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka.

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Next up: Flipboard’s Mike McCue (who just joined the Twitter board).

Spotify's Daniel Ek Splashes Down at D: Dive Into Mobile

Kara Swisher — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 20:58:15 +0000

Next week, we’ll be putting on our first brand extension of the highly successful D: All Things Digital conference with D: Dive Into Mobile.

And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

RIM Buys Android UI Gurus

John Paczkowski — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:45:56 +0000

Hoping to shake its reputation for aging or otherwise unappealing mobile interfaces, Research in Motion is bringing in some new design talent. The company has acquired The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the Swedish design house behind the original Android interface as well as some other impressive concept UIs, like Velvet and Augmented ID, which uses facial recognition software to associate social information with anyone viewed through a smartphone camera (see video embeds below).

A small but brilliant acquisition that should give RIM some much-needed UI design heft as it further polishes its PlayBook tablet and whatever other next-gen QNX-based smartphones it has in the pipeline. For RIM, whose devices have seemed perpetually a generation behind the latest iPhone and Android handsets, TAT’s acumen could be just the thing to strengthen its competitive position and further the efforts of Don Lindsay, its new VP of User Experience (a former Microsoft and Apple hire)–assuming RIM’s willing to take some guidance.

iNority Report: Apple Buys Face-Recognition Co.?

John Paczkowski — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:31:07 +0000

Apple is reportedly close to acquiring Polar Rose, a Swedish company that specializes in face-recognition technology–if it hasn’t already. A pair of reports in the Norwegian and Swedish media claim Apple has bought up all shares in Polar Rose, presumably with an eye toward building its facial-recognition technology into mobile devices like the iPhone.

Polar Rose’s offerings don’t require as much processing power as other recognition engines, making them well-suited to mobile phones and the like. More interestingly, they’re powerful enough to identify faces in live photos and video (see clips below). And there is a world of potential applications for that if Apple (APPL) were to incorporate it into iOS, whether it be as a further enhancement to the Faces technology used in its iPhoto and Aperture applications or as some sort biometric security measure. Recall that one early prototype of the iPad was believed to use a camera and facial recognition to differentiate between different users’ faces, switching out personal settings each time the device changed hands and allowing it to be shared within a family.

Is Polar Rose the acquisition that could make that a reality? It’s certainly possible–assuming there is, in fact, an acquisition. And at this point, that’s unclear. Neither Apple nor Polar Rose will comment on the rumored deal. If they do, I’ll update here.

Pirate Bay Runs Aground, Again

Peter Kafka — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:49:06 +0000

The Pirate Bay, the world’s most notorious hub for illegal downloads, is down again.

The Swedish site has been out all morning. TorrentFreak pins the outage on legal pressure from Hollywood studios, via an injunction granted by a German court against broadband provider CB3ROB, which had been routing the site’s traffic to the Web.

But if you’re looking to nab free music and movies via the site’s BitTorrent hub, you probably won’t have to wait long. As CNET points out, The Pirate Bay has lost bandwidth providers in the past and usually pops back up in fairly short order.

Meanwhile, if you want to grab your stuff via other means, there are plenty of options. LimeWire, for instance, which lost what appears to be a significant court case last week, is still up and running.

Yet Another (Very Attractive) E-Magazine Fantasy

Peter Kafka — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:00:10 +0000

As far as I know, no one has actually spotted one of the much anticipated tablet devices–from Apple (AAPL) or anyone else–in the wild. But that doesn’t stop publishers from dreaming about what they can do with them once they appear.

Here’s the latest stab at it, from Swedish media outfit Bonnier Group, best known in the U.S. as the publisher of specialty magazines like Field & Stream and Popular Science. This one just popped up, unbidden, in my inbox, and I’m happy to share it, because I think looking at this stuff is fun.

Unlike other e-magazine what-ifs publishers have been showing off, Bonnier isn’t even pretending this is fleshed out. So no need to worry about whether it uses Flash; it’s purely a “conceptual video prototype.”

But it’s similar in many ways to stuff we’ve seen from Condé Nast and Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.: The emphasis is on moving the entire print magazine to the tablet, then adjusting layouts, photos and other elements to take advantage of/adapt to the device’s capablities/limitations.

And like the other two prototypes we’ve seen so far, Bonnier keeps the Web and other outside elements (Twitter, etc.) hidden unless you call them up–in this case, via a groovy radial pop-up.

That said, this one does look pretty slick, though it’s entirely possible that this is due to the video’s production qualities. And that dashing designer, Jack Schulze, looks and sounds like the kind of people who play dashing designers in movies.

There’s no sound on this clip for the first 32 seconds or so, so don’t be alarmed. And if you’re going to watch it, it’s well worth tapping on the video and watching it at full-screen size.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Pirate Bay's Would-Be Buyer Sinks, Blames Media

Peter Kafka — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:32:23 +0000

A proposed deal to buy The Pirate Bay and turn it legit, which never made sense in the first place, now looks all but dead.

Global Gaming Factory X, the Swedish software/Internet cafe company that’s supposed to buy the file-sharing haven for $8 million, was supposed to get shareholders to approve the deal today. But in advance of a shareholders meeting, the company issued a press release in which it says 1) that investors that were supposed to finance the deal have disappeared and 2) this is the fault of the U.S. media, which it says spooked said investors.

But wait! There’s more! Global Gaming Factor says it has figured out an alternate way to pay for the deal whereby the company’s majority shareholders in the penny-stock company will offer their equity as a security. Alas, there’s yet another catch: Swedish regulators, who have already suspended trading in the company twice in two months, are now threatening to delist it.

It’s hard to get too worked up about the failure of a plan that made no sense on the day it was announced. But for the record, you can read the backstory to this weird tale here and here. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay itself is up and running and still cheerfully thumbing its nose at Hollywood, the big music labels, and the rest of the media world.

Illegal Downloads, Meet Suspicious Stock Sales: The Pirate Bay Story Gets Even Murkier

Peter Kafka — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:46:56 +0000

The more I hear about the supposed plan for an Internet cafe company to buy the world’s best-known illegal file-sharing site, the more I think that the whole thing is a farce.

So this one doesn’t even faze me: Swedish regulators are looking into insider trading charges at Global Gaming Factory X, which saw shares jump several days before it said it would buy The Pirate Bay.

From Wired (via PaidContent):

AktieTorget, a Swedish exchange listing some 116 public companies, suspended trading in Global Gaming a week before the announcement as trading volume and share prices jumped without public news to account for it.

“There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” said Peter Gönczi, executive vice president at AktieTorget.

Before the sale, average daily volume in Global Gaming was about 162,000 shares. From June 5 to June 18, there was little trading in the stock with an average price of about 9 cents. On June 22, shares nearly doubled to 18 cents with 1.2 million shares sold before trading was halted.

Trading resumed Tuesday, the day of the announced purchase, and shares closed at a high of 38 cents, with a heavy volume of 5.8 million shares traded. Trading closed at 25 cents Wednesday, down 13 cents, and the volume was nearly 7 million shares traded.

But I have a question: Why would anyone think that Global Gaming Factory X shares would be worth more once this news got out?

The company’s announced plan–to sell legal downloads to users who flock to the site for free downloads and to somehow resell bandwidth its users generate to the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) and AT&T (T)–is a nonstarter. If anything, you’d expect insiders to be dumping whatever shares they owned in advance of the news, right?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Swedish penny stocks are like U.S. penny stocks–murky caveat-emptor things that widows and orphans want to avoid. So it’s hard to get too worked up about this or try to puzzle it out. Still, if anyone wants to explain it to me, I’m all ears.

It Was Hard Enough to Take You Seriously With the Word "Phonograph" in Your Name…

John Paczkowski — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:19:51 +0000

You’ve got to love the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry–if not for its hopelessly antediluvian moniker, then for its we’re-on-a-mission-from-God attitude toward its criminal case against torrent index The Pirate Bay. Just two days into the trial–apparently the hottest ticket in Stockholm right now–and already, half the charges against the Swedish site have been dropped because of the prosecution’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the torrent-distributed protocol. Prosecutors had accused the defendants of “complicity in the production of copyrighted material,” i.e., assisting in the distribution of copyrighted material. Today they scrapped that charge, amending it to read, “complicity to make (copyrighted material) available,” after they were unable to prove that The Pirate Bay’s servers actually host copyrighted material.

In a hastily released statement, the IFPI downplayed the abrupt change of tack, claiming the amended charges will simplify its case. Said IFPI counsel Peter Danowsky, “It’s a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works.”

The Pirate Bay had a different take on the matter though. Said co-founder Peter Sunde in a Twitter message: EPIC WINNING LOL.